4 Tools to Gather Detail Information about Battery Life on Windows

As we all agree, the battery is a critical component in mobile devices like laptops but in most of the versions of Windows, we are often less informed than we should be about the battery we are using on our laptops. Given the chemical nature, batteries are prone to wear, corrosion, leakage and outright failure due to the events like short circuits and lightning strikes. They do fail and have decreased performance over time. It’s important to identify and monitor their performance, usage and expected lifespan.

Here are 4 tools/ways to get to know more about your battery and battery life in Windows.

Battery Saver in Windows 10

First introduced in Windows Phone, Battery Saver is a pretty useful tool that not only displays features a useful Battery Usage section that shows you how the battery power is consumed but also provides a way to limit the background processes to make sure that you can squeeze out the most out of the battery.

There’s also a more detailed and thorough battery report available in Windows 10 too. It’s available in previous Windows too but the one in Windows 10 provides you a lot of useful information such as recent usages, usage history, battery capacity history, etc.. You will need to manually generate the report through a command line. It seems, the more often you run the report the longer history you keep in your computer.

To generate the battery report, run the following command in an elevated command prompt window to save the report named battery_report.html in C: drive in HTML format.

powercfg /batteryreport /output “C:\battery_report.html”

NirSoft’s BatteryInfoView – A Portable Tool

Designed for laptops, BatteryInfoView is a portable free tool from NirSoft that displays the current status and information about your battery. The tool is split into two primary components. The first is a screen that presents information like the current capacity of your battery and its wear level. The other is an ongoing log of the bare essentials; power state, capacity, capacity value, rate, and voltage, which gets updated every 30 seconds or any other timer interval that you choose.

BatteryMon – a monitoring tool

BatteryMon is a battery monitoring tool that monitors your battery usage on the go. It’s been designed for Windows based system to monitor the performance of laptop batteries and UPS. The feature includes:

Uniquely identify battery packs for tracking purposes or system inventories

Log the performance of a battery for later reference

See the status of each battery pack, when multiple batteries are in use

BatteryBar – a system tray toolbar

Windows system tray already has a very basic battery indicator, but this BatteryBar provides a much more depth information about your battery in a lightweight and instant way that also doesn’t take up much space on your computer.

The basic version of BatteryBar is free but also has a $4 Pro version that adds in all sorts of personalization options.

To recap

To get a better idea of how the battery performs in your laptop, we’ve listed 4 ways above for you to choose from, a built-in Windows tool, a portable tool, an ongoing monitoring tool, and a system tray tool. Pick one that suits you the best and get the most out of your battery life as possible.